Is anyone else excited for this game? I know I am one of the few people I know who enjoyed FFXIII start to finish, but with the changes made from XIII to XIII-2, is anyone else thinking about getting into it?

There's also a demo right now on XBL if you're interested, not sure on the state of PSN/Steam Demos.

I'm moderately excited. I liked FF13 once I finally got around to playing it with all the negative feedback. From what I've seen of 13-2, it is a lot of more of the same combat-wise which is fine because the combat in 13 was pretty well done I think.

Yeah I'm really looking forward to it. I enjoyed XIII despite the linear play, but it seems SE has finally listened, and has made XIII-2 a lot LESS Linear than XIII was. The combat was pretty polished, and they added a little bit of action for the roaming around outside of battles. I am also a pretty big fan of Serah's weapon. New Crystarium is pretty awesome, and the ability to have monsters fight with you, seems interesting at the least.

Having given it some thought, I liked that you never had to try to figure out where to go next to drive the plot. You did, however, have a huge pile of optional sidequest stuff open up once you got to a certain point -- by this point I was playing with different group comps and setups and whathaveyou, and the optional stuff was fun to *play* with.

The downside was that it was very difficult to gauge how effective certain behaviours were. The combat interface would have benefited from a DPS readout, and the availability of post-fight analytics. I mean, there were numbers everywhere, but it was hard to tell at a glance if some numbers were better than others.

Most of all I liked that I didn't feel like half the game was fighting against the controller (or interface), which is really eating into my entire Zelda groove now.

Thalia wrote:I never finished the first one...cuz I hated how linear it was.

Same here. I plugged a good 6 to 9 hours into it and still didn't like it. At that point I was like "if it really takes LONGER than this to get into the game... is it really worth it?" Poor thing sits on the shelf now, all unfinished.

Thalia wrote:I never finished the first one...cuz I hated how linear it was.

Same here. I plugged a good 6 to 9 hours into it and still didn't like it. At that point I was like "if it really takes LONGER than this to get into the game... is it really worth it?" Poor thing sits on the shelf now, all unfinished.

Yeah that's the game start to finish. The exception is chapter 11, when the game opens up a free-roam world. But it's all just 1 giant zone, there's still no towns etc etc. With about 38 IIRC Missions that are optional (you have to do the first 12 I believe, for a total of 50.) But they're fun to play with, but all skippable.

I'm a firm believer in the FF series. (Outside of 11/14.) But I'm just a fanboy, YMMV

Outside of the linear gameplay, my problem (which started with FFXII) was that you start to lose control of your characters. I like to be able to manually select what they're doing, not set up some gambit type system that basically uses the AI to play for you. I like to feel like I'm more interactive with the characters I'm using.

I actually really liked the Gambit system of FF12 -- I played FF12 during my only haitus from WoW, after burning completely out from running a hard core 40 man raiding guild at the tail end of classic. I remember telling a friend that I liked the gambit system because it was kind of like raiding, only not with idiots. :]

I'm curious to see how the towns and such are implemented. I tend to be of two minds -- expansive worlds are neat, but spending time walking back and forth sometimes feels like a waste of time. I liked that in FF13 you were pretty much always doing what you wanted to be doing. If I want to kill that adamantoise, I can. If I want to skip the trash and go to the next plotpoint, I can do that too.

I do agree that gambit type combat systems are harder to micro -- I used to be really precise and efficient with damage allocation. e.g., I know Cloud does 65% of this mob's health per hit, and Tifa has a Limit Break up and will kill a full-health mob, but does only 20% otherwise, and Barret will do 40%, so I can have Tifa murder Mob A, Cloud hit Mob B, Barret hit mob C, then have Cloud finish Mob C in Round 2, and have Tifa and Barret finish Mob B, so combat takes two rounds.

This kind of scripting isn't possible with the gambit systems, which is a bit unfortunate.

Nikachelle wrote:Outside of the linear gameplay, my problem (which started with FFXII) was that you start to lose control of your characters. I like to be able to manually select what they're doing, not set up some gambit type system that basically uses the AI to play for you. I like to feel like I'm more interactive with the characters I'm using.

I agree with you, which is why I personally selected my actions most of the time. VERY rarely did I use the auto-battle feature.

I made it to the last boss in XIII, but it was a crapshoot boss. If the controlled character gets killed, it's game over, no matter what - and with a death spell and the highest resistance possible being IIRC 60%, it came down to pure luck.

I like that they fixed that in XIII-2 - now if your controlled character dies, it automatically switches you to another one. I'm not sure if I like the whole monster-collecting bit of it though. The town in the demo reminded me a lot of the towns in XII, which can be good or bad - it depends on how much back and forth there's going to be.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

Nikachelle wrote:Outside of the linear gameplay, my problem (which started with FFXII) was that you start to lose control of your characters. I like to be able to manually select what they're doing, not set up some gambit type system that basically uses the AI to play for you. I like to feel like I'm more interactive with the characters I'm using.

I agree with you, which is why I personally selected my actions most of the time. VERY rarely did I use the auto-battle feature.

Hang on... you can turn off auto battle for ALL your characters? It's been like two years since I attempted playing it so I can't remember everything about it, but I thought you could only choose the attacks for your main character, and not the other two who were in your party.

Fivelives wrote:I made it to the last boss in XIII, but it was a crapshoot boss. If the controlled character gets killed, it's game over, no matter what - and with a death spell and the highest resistance possible being IIRC 60%, it came down to pure luck.

I like that they fixed that in XIII-2 - now if your controlled character dies, it automatically switches you to another one. I'm not sure if I like the whole monster-collecting bit of it though. The town in the demo reminded me a lot of the towns in XII, which can be good or bad - it depends on how much back and forth there's going to be.

uhhhhh, I don't remember that on the last boss, and I beat it in 1 shot, while getting the achievement to do it in a timely manner........

Nikachelle wrote:Hang on... you can turn off auto battle for ALL your characters? It's been like two years since I attempted playing it so I can't remember everything about it, but I thought you could only choose the attacks for your main character, and not the other two who were in your party.

No, just your main character, but after you get the hang of your paradigms you can pretty much make them do what you want.

Etc, etc. There was a long rant by one of the Megatokyo guys that posted here about it, too (I forget the name, but it should show up on the FFXIII thread somewhere in the Asylum if you do a forum search - or just look through the Megatokyo webcomic rants, I think they have a search feature on it). Well, not just the last boss, but pretty much the whole entire game got raked over the coals in a 3 part rant on the Megatokyo website.

Either way, I'm glad they fixed it and controlled character death isn't going to be an instant game over in XIII-2.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

I picked mine up yesterday, but I never finished the first one because I got extremely frustrated after arriving at Gran Pulse and trying to do all the misc side missions. I kind of quit after some really hard ones and ended up youtubing the ending. I didn't really understand it because everything they did up to the end seemed to completely contradict their original goal.

Granted, it's also the first PS3 game I've ever played, so I don't know if that's just the norm for modern console games.

Most of the Modern console games look awesome, but Square Enix always splurges on graphics! I haven't played 13-2 yet outside of the demo (I picked it up, but have worked 2 12 hour days O.o) but 13 blew me away with it's graphics, so I'm assuming 13-2 is awesome.

EDIT: Lol, I mistakenly edited your post with my response at first >.< Damn old habits and new mod buttons!

There were a couple characters where the voice acting was like...uhhh okay? Namely, Snow/Hope, and some of the NORA members, in my opinion.

Put about 3-4 hours into XIII-2 Last night, had a BLAST. I absolutely love it, open world roaming is back, you can travel between all of the places you've been to backtrack. Exploring the world is rewarded very well, and overall I really am captivated with the story (The last part could just be me, I tend to like pretty bad stories haha.)

I think the voice acting is more or less the same. The voice actors are the same at least from FF13. Off topic, I actually went to the FF13 pre-launch event with a friend of mine that won some contest and we met the girl voicing Lightning and the guy voicing Snow. They did a pretty good job with their characters imo.

There are some minor niggling issues with animations, but I can forgive those. I really like the story and characters so far - they even made me like Hope and for that, they really worked a miracle there. I even kinda like the pokemon aspect of it, too.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

I just ran into hope fifteen minutes ago. I hated the whiny little puke in 13; he's kind of admirable now. I have three different portals going to different threads, and I know I have to backtrack to a couple places to do some side quest stuff.

So, Final Fantasy Corridor this is not.

One major concern is that people who haven't played 13 may be a bit lost; the story leans heavily on the events of the first. It may not matter much in the long run, but without the backstory this is probably even more confusing.

One great design choice is that the usage of time portals makes it episodic, and easy to say "ok I'm going to stop *here* so I can eat/sleep/be responsible."